


Atonement

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: Eight Nights [2]
Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Redemption, holiday fic, jewish (sort of) holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:24:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Atonement is about the ability to admit we’ve done wrong to those around us. And to ourselves. We can sin against ourselves. There is no greater damage done to the soul than the damage we do ourselves. Weep, and find forgiveness.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atonement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> For @radialarch, who asked for a redemption arc for Jack. I'm so so sorry that this is what you got.

Considering that they have never been denied food before, when Lucinda mutters, “They didn’t bring dinner, and now breakfast,” Jack’s first response isn’t to worry that suddenly his father is trying some new tactic to get him to procreate, as if starvation will get some strange biological impulse to breed raging in his failure of a son. 

Instead he turns in bed, away from her, and mutters, “It’s Atonement.”

“Ten months,” is how she replies. Ten months they’ve been in this room. Last Atonement, Jack was holed up, wrapped in the guile of Katrina Ghent. Last Atonement, Lucinda’s future was solidly secure, completely and utterly wrapped around being a Wolfson. Ten months ago, Jack’s primary concern was how David Shepherd was charming the entire nation.

Last Atonement was last Atonement, and this one is here, unfortunately thick in the trappings of his father’s piety, or whatever passes for piety these days. Even Silas cannot keep everything from Jack, not when the servants and the cooks have known him his whole life. Bits still infiltrate this _living prison_ , curious tidbits of what the king is doing. There are riots, he hears. Lower Malakim Square was ransacked and half-burned. Jack imagines the entire city getting high from the fumes of that. There’s word of famine in Corinth and Bethel. The king no longer goes to see God, there is no official Reverend, everything is a mess.

And still, it’s Atonement, and there’s no food.

~~~~~

At 14 Jack is still puzzling out why his heart quickens at the sight of the other boys in his class in their dark soccer uniforms and even more out of them, Atonement is the holiday where he is dragged back from his boarding school just outside the city and back to the arms of the capitol. Like every Atonement, the king would take the entire royal family to services, to sit and stand and pray at the head of Reverend Samuels congregation like they were there every week.

Michelle is especially sick, but even with her illness, she still drags herself, pale and wan and pretty even with her hair gone (but how pious, her head covered) to the seat next to the king’s, her hand in his the entire time.

And Jack, he’s already finding this all tedious, because even while he enjoys performance and the performance of the royal family is just as exciting for him as it’s ever been, services for Atonement have always been overlong and wherever Reverend Samuels can draw them out, he does. During one of the blessings, Jack finds himself slipping out of the pew, slipping away from where people are lined up to put candles into the wide fountain of water and burn their sins for the year away in that sacred hall, and sitting in the hallway just to the side of the sanctuary, trying not to let the sounds of the old language bleed his brain out of his ears.

“There’s a hole in your soul,” he hears, and he opens his eyes. There is a girl there, small and blonde and in a pristine white dress, her blue eyes focused on him. She looks his age, or maybe a couple of years older, but no more. “Like an animal,” she adds. 

He is suddenly struck, he wants to stand and disagree with her, he wants to demand, _who does she think she is_ and _do you know who I am_ , but she looks at him and he realizes her arms and legs are covered in filth, blackened, and her dress may be pristine but there is a madness in the back of her eyes. “You lack conscience, repentance, you lack what makes you human. You will claw for it, you will wish it untrue, but you will dig your way into the darkness that encapsulates us here and you will drink in every moment of sin.”

He feels a coldness, then, a fear. It is impossible not to, when she speaks, when she says it like that, because there is madness in her but it is _truth_ , he sees it like he sees it in his father when his father speaks to God, he knows the sight of a prophet. He has seen Reverend Samuels deliver prophecy and bring down the power of heaven, and he knows the truth of it. 

But Jack cannot, he cannot simply allow this. “You have the wrong person,” he says, trying to sound like an authority, but all that comes out is fear, a pathetic quaver of terror, horror in the most primal form. “I’ll be king one day-”

“ _Your soul will starve even as it feasts, there is depravity in you,_ ” she howls back, and that’s when one of Reverend Samuels aides comes around the corner, his eyes fixed on the girl. She turns to him and the madness seems to leave her; Jack can’t explain how he knows, but he knows. “There is lack here,” she says, insistent.

“Nathan,” the aide says, and the girl curls her hands, and he looks over at Jack. “Your highness?” he asks, surprised, his gaze going from one to another. “What’s happened?”

Jack scrambles up to his feet and he tugs the bottom of his suit. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing,” he says again, but he can’t summon up his aura of _royalty_. All he can do is hurry back to services, feeling like he’s revealed a piece of himself that he kept hidden.

~~~~

“Atonement is about the ability to admit we’ve done wrong to those around us. And to ourselves. We can sin against ourselves. There is no greater damage done to the soul than the damage we do ourselves. Weep, and find forgiveness.”

Jack’s feels his head, far from his body, drugged out of himself, listening to someone nearby drone on and on in a deep, booming voice, the emptiness in his stomach more than filled by the sweet satisfaction of those tiny tablets on his tongue.

The mouth on his cock is hot and lush. “I want to come on your face,” Jack says, his thumbs brushing short blonde hair away from the boy’s face, trying to focus his eyes but lacking the precise ability to care. “You’re going to let me,” he says, managing, finally, to focus on the boy’s mouth, stretched wide over him. It’s beautiful, Jack manages to piece together, not for the way it looks, the way his mouth is so red, but because of the way it feels, hot and wet and for the power of it, here in a private corner of the sanctuary, Atonement services booming nearby. 

“Everyone will see,” the boy says, pressing his mouth against Jack’s cock, the underside, worshipping with his lips and his tongue. He says it with a tiny whine, a moan of _need_ , and the noise makes Jack throb. He really wants to fuck the boy’s mouth, hard, until he’s choking, and he refuses to give into the darker impulse. 

Jack smiles, instead, his long fingers in the back of the boy’s hair, caught in curls of pale sunshine yellow. “Which is worse? Someone catching sight of me on your face, or neglecting God’s edict to fast on this glorious day of Atonement? Which sin bears a greater burden on your conscience?”

The boy takes a long moment, stares right up at Jack, and finally his hand goes to jerk him off, and when Jack comes a few moments later in a rush of _whiteness_ , it spills over the boy’s face.

~~~~~

The famine does not hit Jack as hard as it hits his mother, he thinks, who lived through famine in her youth and fears it more than anything. This would be much more effective if he cared anymore, about his mother’s fears, but it is amazing what a year and a half of neglect, followed by a year and a half of exile will do to a man’s attachment to his family. 

It is the the point where if possible, Jack would gladly shoot his mother in the head and step over her body, but those thoughts are not only treasonous, they’re difficult to indulge in. There is nothing left for Jack but to die, but he cannot die, he’s not allowed the gift of death even out in the middle of the fighting where people drop like flies every few minutes. He’s been shot, been stabbed, been concussed, and on one memorable occasion, been poisoned, but he lives still, he lives like a joke. The other men in his unit have a joke about it, about how disgrace is something God refuses to have called by death, and Jack no longer broods over it.

But dusk falls and it is quiet, quieter than it has been in days. Atonement, he thinks, as if the veil of night and the promise of empty bellies makes the air quieter by virtue of holiness. Of course there is a cease fire, because David is too pious to allow the fighting to continue on his side, and over here, in the land of the forsaken, led by a king so far out of favor that he has razed every house of God from Shiloh to the far edges of Selah to the ground and been met with famine and misfortune at every turn, the men find that the last vestiges of their childhood religion rears its head on Atonement.

Jack does not go to the radio services, where the men huddle furtively around an old radio broadcast of Reverend Samuel’s booming voice, speaking the truths of God and the virtues of men who bear the contents of their souls to the mercy of it, who weep at the awe of vulnerability. His own soul is stripped of all the properties of kindness and wonder and gratitude, left only with the dregs of his humanity, and the lightness of a man who is filled with nothing.

There’s a hole in his soul, and God refuses to accept back such damaged materials.

But there is something in Atonement, as well. His usual cadre of men who follow him, who keep him in check, from running or killing himself or whatever else his father thinks he will do, now that he has been burdened with the glorious freedom of the outdoors and the possession of a gun, they’re all suddenly inspired to sit around a battered radio and listen to Atonement services echo up from the past, spoken by a dead man.

Jack, then, feels himself get up as though he is puppeteered by the force of David’s presence on the other side of this battlefield, and walks. 

No one shoots. It’s Atonement. Even as he walks across David’s camp, pulled by some force that comes right from the core of his gut, no one even really looks at him. 

David’s tent is guarded but maybe it’s how desperate he looks, or maybe the fact that he looks like a dead man, not someone living at all, and David has no reason to fear a dead man, that they let him by without a word, and when he gets there, it’s David he sees first, David who has always commanded his attention, from that first moment where he stepped into the parlor at Altar Mansion and there he was, beautiful and golden and perfect.

He still looks like all those things, but Jack can’t look at him long. 

“Jack?”

Jack falls to his knees, pulls his gun out of the holster, and sets it down, bending over double so his forearms are on the ground and his hands are in his hair. He has never prostrated himself like this, not before God, not before anyone. Even when his father made him kiss the ground he walked on, there was nothing like this, nothing like this utter surrender. “Please,” he begs, “please, let me die.”

“Get out-” Jack hears David say, and he thinks, no, until he realizes a moment later that it isn’t Jack who David is speaking to, as people rustle past. “You too, Nathan,” David says.

“This choice will define you,” Jack hears a familiar voice say, girlish and small, but then there is a rustling of fabric and there is silence.

Silence even as David kneels next to him, taking Jack’s wrists in his hands, and pulls him up to kneeling, so they are before each other. There are lines on David’s face, and they blur in and out of focus, hot and wet. “I will kneel before you, I will surrender to you, I will kiss the ground you walk on and thank you for the pleasure, but you _must let me die_.”

“I don’t make those decisions,” David says, and then Jack is weeping on David’s shoulder, wracking sobs that he thought he no longer had within him, that he thought had evaporated one day, long ago, when Joseph died, and the last part of his immortal soul had blackened away into nothing.

~~~~~

Joseph dies in that year that Jack does not care to recall, after Atonement and before Sacrifice.

~~~~~

It takes almost a year for Jack to realize how even David’s shadow makes him feel illuminated, weightless, breathing without the ache of it. The kind of loyalty that instills is undeniable; Jack hates him for that, for the knowledge that he would crawl through broken glass, bleed out, marr himself and suffer humiliation for David’s approval, and the naive farmboy doesn’t even seem to realize. He leads this army with the casualness and a certain level of incompetence that should be disastrous, but instead it just _works out_. He defers to Jack and even that never seems to work itself into the filthy mess. He says he will not take the crown from Jack, and no one argues. Everything he does is blessed. He has grown, changed, become more commanding, less trusting, maybe (but he seems to trust Jack, in some form, or another, despite Shiloh, despite everything that happened three years ago) but he has not changed enough. Or his men have changed him back.

It’s disgusting.

The worst of it is that Jack feels the creeping pull of dependency, the insidious tendrils of something that speaks more of affection than of hate ensnaring itself around his stomach. He feels as though something is clawing its way around his heart, sharp talons gladly bleeding at every movement David takes away from him.

It was not meant to happen an hour before Atonement; they control a portion of Shiloh, now, and David has saved them all, is what the people are saying in hushed whispers, when the armies of Silas fall or run or worse of all, join, when there is no police to shoot them for the treason. 

Atonement comes just as Judgement Day ends, and David is no judge, not _yet_ , when he asks Jack, as easily as breathing, “Is it so different, to kiss a man?”

“Is it so different to only kiss that who you love?” Jack asks in reply.

David looks over a bit, and laughs. “Not kiss,” he says, “sex, sex and love should be linked, but kissing is not so sacred.”

And then David kisses him, and Jack finds for the first time since he was thirteen he is reduced to naught but a _whimper_ , as if the whole of him dissolved at the chasteness of a kiss. 

When David moves away, the hole inside of him screams with a fury, claws to the surface, threatens to engulf the world, and Jack gets up. “Wait,” he hears David say, but the words cannot reach him, not when the only thing to reach is hate and bile and nothingness. “Wait,” David repeats, following where Jack goes, when Jack himself doesn’t know where he’s going. “ _Wait_ , three times, _wait!_ ”

Jack turns, teeth bared, fury in his voice that he cannot temper away. “I will not be some toy for you to try out, I will not be some _experiment_ , not even for you,” _especially not for you_ , “I will not-”

David interrupts it with a kiss, frantic, his hands coming up against the sides of them, and then he is acting, this hour before Atonement, before he will set himself to the prayers that Nathan is leading, before he will _repent_ for it. “Please,” David says, “I don’t think I have the courage-”

“To do it an hour before Atonement?” Jack snaps, the bitterness in his voice sharp as the edge of a blade, making David reel back, the hurt clear. “To do it before Nathan can wipe this away?”

“No,” David replies, quietly, and he kisses Jack a third time. “There is nothing in this that I want to repent.”

And here is the truth of it: Jack has been David’s, through and through, from the moment that David pulled him from that tent in the middle of nowhere. 

~~~~~

“Don’t you have any care for your soul?” Katrina asks, and for all that she’s joking, Jack can’t do much but tug the tie one way or another as he steps out of one of the dressing rooms at Unity Hall. “We should both be at services.”

“You would have the entire congregation drown in the weight of my sins,” Jack replies, “and this is not me stopping you.”

Katrina shrugs. She doesn’t have to be here, as she doesn’t actually do any real work, but here she is anyway, dressed in an outfit that would cost any laborer in the city a year’s worth of pay. “I don’t really care for the attitude of Atonement,” she finally admits.

“I imagined that after yesterday’s proceeds that you, of all people, would revel in the notion of forgiveness from sins.” Jack is still not amused at Katrina’s displeasure, but she seems affable enough today.

She shakes her head. “You’ve missed the point of the holy day entirely. It’s not about God counting our sins. It’s about us coming to terms with them.”

Jack holds back an intense sigh, when sighing is so common. His mother would ban the act from Jack’s body, if she had her way. “I am in no mood to debate theology. Go find a minister to council you if that’s what you seek.”

Katrina doesn’t reply. She slides one hand over her breast, as if there’s something there, and Jack looks for a moment before he looks back up at her face. This is absurd to a degree that he did not imagine to be possible. “Seek absolution elsewhere,” he says, before he leaves her. He will not find his own where she offers.

~~~~~

He and Michelle light candles, carefully, their hands guided by Reverend Samuels, and he tells them carefully that Atonement is not so they can seek forgiveness for trespasses, but because evil deeds create demons, and when they die they will have to face them all. It is easier, he tells them, to face demons when they know the shape that they will make in the dim light.

He does not sleep well for three weeks after that. Hist mother does not appreciate the lesson.

~~~~~

Jack has solved it, the mystery of the hole inside of him.

The contours of David’s body are different, somehow, the way he arches his back more beautiful, the swell of his cock more arousing, his mouth more intoxicating. Jack has dug and dug his way into the depravities of the human condition but it is the way that David acts - like there is no sin here, like this is love and through love it is grace, like God can act between them and around them and within them despite Jack’s shortcomings and David’s clear and utter lack of taste when it comes to how he will tarnish his soul. 

The morning comes and David stirs and wants to go again, and Jack laughs - _laughs_ , a true laugh, as has not been heard in years - and they do, again, slowly, hungrily, making up in kisses and touch and the rasp of skin on skin in what they cannot eat. Feasting on each other. 

“Sins on Atonement,” Jack says, pushing a curl back from David’s forehead.

“I see no one sinning here,” David replies, the smile on his face indulgent. “Simply my soul knit to yours. I love you as my own soul.”

There is silence, then. “I love you as my own soul,” Jack says, “I love you as my king.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the lines are lifted directly from the Book of Samuel, like "I love you as my own soul" and "my soul is knit to yours" because there is no homosexuality in the Bible except where David and Jonathan are concerned, where it turns super gay super fast. Some of Nathan's lines, particularly "there's a hole in your soul like an animal, with no conscience or repentance" is stolen from that poet of poets, Dave Gahan (that's the lead singer of Depeche Mode) and the song "A Pain That I'm Used To" and thank you for spotting my earlier error, violateraindrop!


End file.
